How It Always Starts
by 10millionpeople
Summary: "I don't want to be alone in this," Abigail whispers, and her lips are so close it sounds like a yell. Still she angles her face closer to his. "And neither do you." / WillAbigail. Fluff. Spoilers for up to 1x11, just to be safe.


**A/N- Oh my god I haven't written in forever what is going on here anymore? Anyway, I'm back with a new fandom (because icanteven mybbywill) and these characters are probably **_**wayyy**_** OOC and this is pretty much fluff but whatever**

**Thanks for reading!**

* * *

Will stops, old floorboards creaking under the weight of his body and the small suitcase he rolls behind him. He turns around, runs a hand through his hair and adjusts his glasses.

"It isn't much, but…it'll do." He shrugs at the girl standing in his doorway, her frame small and fragile, her strength perhaps sturdier.

Abigail smiles weakly, awkwardly. "Thanks," she says, and drags out the end of it like she doesn't know what else to say. _Neither of us do, then,_ Will muses.

Several heartbeats later (and Will can hear them from her chest, they're so rapid) they make their way to Will's bedroom, and he puts her suitcase on a chair in the corner.

Abigail stops before entering. "Are you sure this is okay? It would be easier for me to sleep on the couch than you, anyway…"

"It's a pullout, so I'll be fine," Will assures, walking to her and ushering her inside, a hand at the small of her back. It feels nice, he thinks, to be able to do this for her. Not just put his hand at her back, where warmth radiates off her skin, but to be able to help her. He likes protecting people, he knows, but he likes protecting _her_ just a little bit more.

Is that normal?

Abigail smiles at him, a little less hesitant now, and he returns the favor, moving to exit the bedroom. "Do you like chicken?" he asks, and she nods. "Good, okay. Dinner will be ready in about an hour, so I'll leave you until then."

As he is about to shut the door behind him, he hears her. "Will?" He stops, opens the door fully again. "Are you making it? Can I help you?" He rolls this over in his head a little. He knows she has cooked with Hannibal since the incident, but he is so afraid something they do will remind her of her father.

Will exhales. "Sure, Abigail. Come to the kitchen when you're ready."

She leaves the bedroom with him.

* * *

She glazes the breast with his marinate, and a couple times through weak conversation Will starts at the domesticity of all this, the naturalness of her here, with him, preparing dinner. His dogs even scurry and scatter amongst them, and all of it feels inexplicably _normal_.

"Thank you, Will, by the way," Abigail says on a sigh. "I knew Dr. Bloom would never let me out of the hospital if I stayed in Baltimore. She said I was 'too close to it,' whatever that means."

He chuffs. "Familiar places can be a trigger for buried memories, even those so deep in the recesses of our mind that we've forgotten they're still there. And it's no problem, really. I'm happy to open up my home to you." Abigail smiles at this, and Will feels the distant normalcy of their entire situation heavy on his mind, but he's quick to shake it off. Nothing about any of this is normal.

She finishes spreading the marinate over the uncooked chicken, and he reaches over her to grab the pan. Abigail opens the oven for him, and he can once again feel the warmth radiating from her skin. (It's too natural a heat to come from the oven, he thinks, and quickly moves away.)

Will sets the timer, opens the fridge to get himself a beer. He contemplates asking Abigail if she wants one, but decides against it.

She is already settled at the small kitchen table, legs crossed in the cushioned chair, book in one hand, tuft of dog skin in the other. She scratches Winston carefully behind the ears, and he wonders how she found his sweet spot so quickly.

Will takes a seat beside her, looking down at her book to see the title. She flips the cover over for him, still reading, still scratching.

He laughs a little, taking a swig of the beer before putting it out of their way, and more of the expositional awkwardness seems to dissolve. "I never took you for the poetry type," Will mutters, and she smiles sullenly.

"Eliot was my mother's favorite…bought me my first anthology of his when I turned thirteen." Will can see the glaze settling in over her eyes, and he moves to take the book.

"May I?" She nods, sniffing only once. He flips through the pages until he finds one, breathing, "Ah, okay," before a cough. "'Let us go then, you and I, when the evening is spread out against the sky…'"

"'Like a patient etherized upon a table,'" she finishes from memory, leaning so into him that Will thinks she must still be shook up, from the image of her mother or the symbolism of the line she just recited. His mind flashes to her, comatose on a foreign hospital bed, and he hands her the book back. She protests, wiping her eyes.

"Will you…" Abigail pauses. "Will you read some more to me? I just really love this one," and he knows what she means, because he does too. He takes the book back, adjusts his glasses.

* * *

By the time the chicken is done, the book is on the other side of the table, forgotten, Winston is in another room, and Will is instinctively scratching Abigail's back, her head resting on her arms. The ding of the timer jolts them both back into reality, and a blush creeps up Will's face when Abigail stands, straightening her shirt in the back.

God, he's an idiot. Alana trusted him to provide structure, stability for Abigail, not create more confusion. It wasn't much, and he doesn't even know if he thinks about her that way (does he?), but isn't that how it always starts?

"I'm sorry about that, I shouldn't have—" She smiles at him.

"It's fine, Will." And he can tell she means it.

He stops the timer, blush fading, and grabs an oven mitt to get the chicken. When he has it on the counter, he takes a whiff, and although he knows his dinners will never be as elegant as Hannibal's, he thinks (maybe because he added more Worcestershire or maybe because she helped) that this smells particularly good tonight.

Abigail already has plates ready for him to serve after he cuts the meat. "It smells really good, Will," she says, solidifying his beliefs.

He can't really look at her quite yet. "I know it's not what you're used to at Hannibal's…" he starts, but she shakes her head.

"I've always preferred more humble meals, to be honest." She laughs. "But don't tell him that! He spends so much time in that kitchen, you'd think he would run out of things to eat."

(If this was her way of saying she preferred him over Hannibal, he thinks, it came at a bad time.)

Will smirks at the remark while putting the last of the chicken on his plate, following Abigail to the table. They sit down, but his hand pauses on his fork. "Sorry this doesn't have anything else with it—I can fix some green beans too, if you're still hungry—"

He is stopped midsentence by her hand on his, the warmth returning. "It's fine, I promise," Abigail soothes, "I don't eat very much these days anyway." At this, Will releases a breath, his heart breaking a little because he knows even though she puts on a good show, smiles when necessary and laughs when appropriate, it's just that—a show.

She has walls built up so high that she has forgotten the difference between genuine happiness and her phony, manmade happiness, and it occurs to Will that maybe he has the same problem.

"Besides, you apologize too much. You really should work on that, or people are going to take advantage of you." He ponders this. Guess he should be more proactive, then.

"Abigail, can I ask you something?" She has thus removed her hand, and both tend to their food, although it is merely picking like birds.

She chews, swallows. "Sure."

Will tickles the scruff on his chin, buying time. "When Dr. Bloom suggested you stay somewhere out of Baltimore, you were the one who suggested me. But you didn't know if I even lived out of Baltimore, did you?" He can see her grab her bottom lip between her teeth, look down at her food. "Why me, Abigail?"

She opens her mouth to say something, and god, he doesn't want it to be that she sees her father in him. It _can't_ be that.

"I like you, Will," she says, and once again he feels a familiarity in her words. A familiarity with her. "You think the same way I do, and I can see that it scares you just like the way I think scares me. You understand—" And he is begging now, _don't say your father, don't say your father. _"You understand me. And I don't think anyone else really does right now."

Will is struck by this in a way so far from what he was expecting that he has to take a few moments away from his food to breathe again.

When he regains respiratory functions, he uses them to laugh. "I like you too, Abigail," and they leave it at that.

* * *

After dinner, they wash the dishes in silence, Abigail scrubbing with soap and rinsing, passing them to Will to dry and put up. When she gets to the utensils, he opens the drawer to stash the forks when he hears her gasp, eyes locked on the sheen of his cutting knives now revealed.

His remembers the knife, identical to his, held at her throat and slicing. He remembers imagining himself holding the knife, himself doing the cutting.

"Will…"

She remains there, staring at the knives long after Will has shut the drawer, and slowly he coils her into an embrace. He tangles a hand in her hair, a hand between her shoulder blades. Through her soft, quiet sobs he can feel her arms curling around his waist under his jacket, and right now, he doesn't care. He just hopes it makes her feel as safe as it does him.

* * *

It isn't until eleven that they decide to go to bed.

When Abigail recovers from the knife sighting (he assumes seeing it not being used for cooking is what set her off, because Hannibal had said she was fine otherwise), Will suggests TV on his couch-not-yet-bed, and by ten o'clock her head has lolled over on his shoulder, the quiet buzz of Full House keeping her only half-awake.

When the marathon ends, switching sitcoms, he prods her awake (because this _right_ is too close to being wrong, he thinks) and she rubs her eyes, groggy. Already in their pajamas, Will can feel the extreme warmth of her all over his body, through the flannel pants he wears on the rare occasion he can't sleep in his boxers.

She smiles at him. "So who gets the bathroom first?"

He laughs. "I already brushed my teeth and all, so it's yours." She stands from the couch, offers him a hand up as well. When they're both standing, Abigail pulls Will into a hug, standing on her tip-toes to reach around her neck.

"Thank you, Will," she says, and he relaxes into her, by this point nearly sweating. When they release, he smiles at her a last time before she disappears into the bathroom, then starts moving open up the couch bed.

The sheets are already on the bed, so he just takes an old quilt out of the hall closet to throw overtop them. He contemplates staying in his pajama pants, but he is just so hot, and it would be inane to turn on the air conditioner this far into winter.

Keeping with the fact that as long as he wakes up before she does, there is no way she will have to see him pants-less, he strips, laying them across the back of the couch. Relieved, he slips under the sheets and quilt soundlessly just as Abigail pops out of the bathroom, extinguishing the hall light.

* * *

Suddenly, Will is awoken by a scream, and he knows for once he didn't dream this. Fumbling around for his pants, (_damnit, where are his pants!_) he finally finds them, pulls them on, and practically runs to the bedroom where Abigail is, his dogs beating him there.

"Abigail?" She is crying when he gets there, hand on her scar, thrashing and trembling in her sleep and he can _feel_ the fear—cold now, not warmth—exuberated from her being. Ignoring his dogs' whimpers, he hurries to sit on the side of the bed, pulling her body into his, her hand away from her neck. "Abigail, it's okay, you're dreaming, it's okay…"

Will does his best to shush her, but she still doesn't wake up. Releasing her, he moves one of his hands to the scar on her neck and the other to her cheek. "Abigail, you have to listen to me. It's Will, you're okay." He tries Hannibal's memory trick, and checks his watch first. "It's 2:27 am, you're in Wolf Trap, Virginia, and your name is Abigail Hobbs."

Slowly, Abigail stops fighting Will's touch, stops thrashing and trembling. She instead is racked with heavy sobs, much, much heavier than those that came upon her in the kitchen earlier. She collapses into him, burying her face in his chest like maybe the space between his ribs is deep enough to bury her sins.

(Will knows it isn't.)

And so he holds her for a while, rubbing those small circles into her back that he had realized she liked while they waited for dinner. He holds her until she pulls away, until she is stable enough to hold her head up herself, and pull her shoulders out from inside his chest.

"Will, I…" she falters, still hiccupping. He runs a hand through her hair, his other hand still on her neck. "It was _so real_. It was like he was right there, and I…I _helped him_, Will! How could I do something like that?" She starts sobbing again but doesn't curl into him, and he wonders for a minute if she meant the last part solely in the dream or in the real case, as well. He doesn't think this is a good time to ask.

"I know, Abigail, I know…" Will does know. He knows exactly what it's like to be trapped between two realities, because when he sees Garrett Jacob Hobbs in his own nightmares, it _is _real. "It's okay, Abigail, I know…"

She sniffs, and he is content to press their foreheads together as some last, failing grasp at comfort. Her hands instinctively move around him, and it isn't until they are too entwined that he starts to think that maybe he's in a little too deep.

"Abigail…" Will breathes, pulling away from her. She claws at his chest, begging.

"No, no, Will, please no…" She grabs his face, pulls it back to hers. "Stay. Please."

He strokes her hair, his eyes, glasses-free, unobstructed, drowning in her misery mixed with his own. "Abigail, I can't. I'm taking… I'm taking advantage of you. You're emotionally unstable and I'm taking advantage of you."

She closes her eyes against his words. "You're emotionally unstable too, Will. You are the only—" hiccup, "—person who understands me. We… f-fit," she pleads. "At least right now, we fit." Tears still pool in her eyes, full and heavy before dripping down her cheek, under his hands.

The coldness of her begins to fade. "I don't want to be alone in this," Abigail whispers, and her lips are so close it sounds like a yell. Still she angles her face closer to his. "And neither do you."

"Abigail."

"Will." Will sighs, accepting defeat, although his intestines refuse to release their knot. She scoots over in the bed, and he pulls his legs under the comforter, turning towards her. _It's just for comfort,_ he tells himself. _Just comfort. _She faces him, looks at him with a kind of respect. "Don't you dare apologize for this," she manages, smiling. He mirrors her.

"I won't," he says, and she runs a hand up around his hip bone, pulling him to her, breaking the barrier between them in this strange, intimate land.

They magnetically move closer, and before Will knows what's happening, his arms are threaded around her waist, him now pulling her, turned away from him, right under the nook of his chin. She clings to his arms encircling her, wrapping him around her even more fully. His lips rest against her ear, and when she turns her head up to face the ceiling, they graze her cheek.

"Thank you," Abigail says, but it's more like a breath than actual vocal movement. He laughs against the side of her face.

"You say thank you too much," and she gives a small chuckle, too. Will ducks his head down to nuzzle her neck (and damn if he isn't getting romantic with this, well screw it), and suddenly he can feel her scar under his lips, hot and jagged. He feels her take a sharp breath, but when she threads their fingers, pressing both of their hands into her stomach, he places a soft, airy kiss on the one part of her he couldn't save.

Abigail slowly pushes one leg behind her to entwine it with Will's, and for the first time in two years, neither have nightmares while they sleep.

_Oh, yes_, Will ponders. He thinks of her that way, at least a little. And as wrong as he knows it is, he won't do anything about it other than this. But this, after all, is how it always starts.

* * *

**A/N- Oh my god that was mush. All of it, mush. Thanks for putting up with my fluff! I really wanted to include more of Abigail's dad into it, but I couldn't really find a way… (*Garrett Jacob Sobs*)**

**Leave me a review and I'll be forever grateful! Let me know I'm not alone in this ship, holy.**


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